


Private Theatricals

by Watergaw



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Jane Austen - Freeform, M/M, Nineteenth Century
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-09
Updated: 2017-04-09
Packaged: 2018-10-16 17:53:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10576440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Watergaw/pseuds/Watergaw
Summary: Some unmitigated historical fluff as a gift for my dear Yunitsa on this auspicious occasion. In which I commit acts of petty larceny on the works of Jane Austen and set the whole thing in 1865 for reasons of insufferable pedantry. I hope it makes you smile.Mr Victor Nikiforov, rich, handsome, accomplished, and quite the most eligible bachelor in four counties, has a problem. His friend Giacometti has a solution.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yunitsa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yunitsa/gifts).



December 1865

  
Mr Victor Nikiforov, rich, handsome, accomplished, and quite the most eligible bachelor in four counties, was distressed to a most painful degree. His affliction was of a peculiarly embarrassing kind: he found himself unable to utter a syllable in the presence of the most amiable man of his acquaintance, Mr Yuuri Katsuki. Bad enough in itself, for Victor it was still worse. Victor had a reputation to uphold. He was failing miserably.

  
His dear friend and professional connection, Mr Christophe Giacometti, was both conscious of his situation and the rich possibilities it afforded for his own amusement. It was almost enough to make Victor regret their long association.

  
Damn the man, but he was laughing!

  
“Oh, Nikiforov, how can you look so serious? You fell into the ha-ha.”

  
“I fail to see how you can find the slightest amusement in my misfortune. It's the merest luck that I haven't done myself a mischief.”

  
“Not when it's as shallow as that, you couldn't. And really, it is most amusing. There's you, with all those bold words you write, all that information. All lost in admiration of a pair of fine eyes, and you unable to distinguish the lawn from a hole in the ground,”

  
Victor placed his hand across his heart, and spoke with feeling. “Giacometti, you wound me! It was a moment’s distraction. It could have happened to anyone, really.”

  
The party of guests had gone to see the four curious stone heads rising from the east lawn. Observing their likeness to the komainu or lion-dogs of his homeland, Yuuri had asked what the carvings represented. Victor had merely given a little too much attention to the pleasure of hearing him talk. Nothing could be more natural.

  
And yet Giacometti could and did dispute the logic of Victor’s conclusion.

  
“You fell. Into the ha-ha. My dear Nikiforov, you are not subtle, and every time you are in company with Mr. Katsuki, you come near to losing your senses. Must we keep salts to hand, or do you have a plan of action?”

  
Victor conceded the point with a groan. “Oh, but he must think me a fool! When I try to speak with him, he blushes. And after he was so very forward at Mrs Crawford’s ball last season. Do you think he's changed his mind?” Victor frowned. “He’s quite brilliant, you know. He was handpicked to go and work with Professor Williamson. I can't imagine what he’d see in a fribble like me.”

  
“And now you are fishing! But you’ll get no satisfaction from me on that score. The Bell is well-known for the folly of its staff, of course.” Giacometti broke off, with an arch smile. “Everybody knows what is due to you, and you can have little doubt of his feelings. What would it take to bring on a declaration, I wonder?”

  
Victor protested. “How can you be so cruel? You ought to help me!”

  
“Well, I might have one idea, you know.” Giacometti’s smile was a saucy, playful thing.

  
#

“This scheme of yours is the height of impropriety,” cried Mr Plisetsky in vexation. ‘What's more, it's undignified. I’ll have nothing to do with it.”

  
“I think it an excellent plan,” said Mr Chulanont, eyes sparkling. “We shall have capital entertainment, and a very fine opportunity for improvement in rhetoric and our English speaking. Besides, there's no harm in the world in private theatricals. We mean no display, but only a little amusement among ourselves, you know.”

  
“As to the play,” said Chris, “I think that we could not choose better. We need only to fill up the parts.”

  
“Here are two tragic parts made to fit Lee and Popovich, if they should think it agreeable.”

  
“You must take the Baron’s part, dear Chulanont, and Nikiforov will be our Anhalt. For Emil…” Giacometti took time to pause, “why it falls most naturally to Katsuki, if he might be prevailed upon to undertake it. What think you?”

  
“Oh, I dare say he will. I shall run him to ground and make the offer. But what part will you undertake?”

  
“Why, only Verdun the rhyming butler. A trifling part.”

  
“That,” said Chulanont, “is not my understanding of the matter.” He smiled and shook his head. ‘A good thing that we are to be private, too. I do not think the district is prepared for the spectacle of you, rhyming all over the place.”

#

The play was to be rehearsed and performed in the airy space of the central hall, its archways and painted pilasters offering the finest theatre that could be wished. Sir Walter and Lady Trevelyan were delighted with their guests’ choice of entertainment, though expressing some surprise at the choice of so very old a play. Mr Giacometti confessed a fondness for it as one familiar from his school day lessons in English, and if anybody entertained further suspicions as to his motives, they did not voice them, although Mr Plisetsky looked very much as if he would have liked to do so.

  
The party was in lively spirits, all alert and impatient for the first full rehearsal, set to take place after dinner. Yuuri had found a seat opposite their projected stage, under a mural of Romans, beginning the work of their wall, and sat feeling the weight of his own small undertaking, trembling between fear and excitement. He had sat in this state for a short while, when Mr Chulanont came to find him.

  
“You wanted to see me?”

  
“Oh, yes! I find I must entreat your help. I know that it isn't your part, but I’d be so much obliged if you might rehearse my lines with me.” Yuuri lowered his eyes, and bit his lip. “I haven't gone through it with Nikiforov yet. I don't know if I could. There are…there are some speeches.”

  
He opened his book. “I mean, look at this…and this. How can I possibly look him in the eye and say such things? Please, Phichit. Read it with me, and take his part, then perhaps I shall get used to it.”

  
“But of course. Though as to the speeches, you could, and you absolutely should.”

#

The evening’s rehearsal moved in fits and starts, with most of the would-be actors playing both their lines and their errors for their own delight in the ridiculous. Yet the tension mounted as they began the play’s third act, and was palpable even to those still out of the secret. Victor was almost feverish, conscious at once of his role in a comedy, and quite unable to forget the seriousness of the possibilities his words evoke.

  
Caught in the fresh enormity of speaking lines obliging him to ask Yuuri whether he has any inclination to marriage, Victor failed to prepare himself for the new weight Yuuri’s presence brought to his response.

  
In this state, Victor was unable to keep himself from starting with surprised pleasure as Yuuri voiced the confession, “I am in love.” And when Yuuri spoke of the doubt that he might be loved in return, Victor responded with fervour.

  
“Who is there that would not?”

  
“Would you?”

  
The question left Victor almost incapable of speech. Yet if Victor's nature and feeling spilled over into his performance, it found a counterbalance in the increasing ardour of Yuuri’s response. Emboldened by Victor’s blushes, Yuuri entreated him to give him lessons in love in tones that revived memories in those who had had the good fortune to be present at a certain singular ball. The resemblance added still further to Victor's distraction. On their makeshift stage, Yuuri bore down on Victor, blinking up at him and smiling.

  
“Come then, teach it me - teach it me as you taught me geography, languages, and other important things.”

  
“…!”

  
“Ah! You won't. — You know you have already taught me that, and you won't begin again.”

  
“You misconstrue. You misconceive everything I say or do. The subject I came to you upon was marriage.”

  
“ A very proper subject from the man who has taught me love, and I accept the proposal.”

The play continued, and though none of its cast had much talent for acting, all were agreed that Nikiforov and Katsuki were the very best and most natural thing in it, and no one was in the least surprised when the match proposed in fiction became a reality.

  
“It is a considerable matter of joy to me,” said Giacometti, “that I made the match myself.”

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Victor is on the staff of Alexander Herzen's Kolokol, and I've taken the liberty of making Yuuri one of the group of students from Satsuma who arrived in 1865, and studied at UCL. They are at Wallington Hall because I like it, and because the Trevelyans would have this kind of party staying with them. The lines from the play are all from Elizabeth Inchbald's Lover's Vows, translated from a German play by Kotzebue.
> 
> ____________
> 
> Addition, as Hailey's very kind recommendation of this means it's being read by a few people who might need a little bit more explanation of what's going on. 
> 
> Mansfield Park is almost everyone's least favourite Jane Austen novel because the heroine, Fanny Price, is so very, very proper, unlike Elizabeth Bennet, who thinks nothing of going for a walk through the mud or putting Darcy in his place, or Emma, who is very impulsive. Fanny is super anxious and desperately in love with her cousin, Edmund. Fanny's a little bit like Yuuri, but she's very frustrating because she never does misbehave. 
> 
> In Mansfield Park, the characters decide to put on a private production of the play Lover's Vows. It's a bit of a risque choice for a group of upper class singles because it's about a woman who had a child outside marriage. The German title is basically 'love child'. Fanny is completely scandalised by the whole thing, and absolutely fascinated with it at the same time. She gets more fascinated when her cousin decides that he's going to have to be in it because otherwise his older brother might get someone else to step in, and then everyone will get up in their business. As a side effect of this, it just so happens that he will have to do a love scene with their flirtatious and fun neighbour, Mary. Edmund has a serious crush on her, and Fanny is very worried about the whole thing, because she's sure that if they go through with the performance, Edmund and Mary might fall in love. I've given Fanny's objections to Yurio, because given the banquet pole dancing, nobody would be bothered enough about propriety to be scandalised. They absolutely would do the play, and the characters with a mutual crush who need a little nudge in the right direction would get together. 
> 
> Yuuri wants to rehearse with Phichit as a nod to a scene where Mary turns up and asks Fanny if she'll run lines with her because she can't imagine being forward enough to say any of the things her character has to say to Edmund's face, and because she says Fanny looks a little bit like Edmund. The 1999 film version of this riffs on this for a delicious slightly femslash scene, which departure from canon I heartily endorse. I showed remarkable restraint in not including lines where Mary talks about needing to "harden" herself to this because it would've gotten in the way of the tone, sadly, but really it's here because I read this very, very not suitable for work fic in which Phichit plays Victor for Yuuri, and I am a terrible person: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9868835. 
> 
> Chris as the rhyming butler is because the character in Mansfield Park who takes that role spends a lot of time talking about how small his part is, but if you read the play, it's a massive part. And I'm not above a dick joke. Chris's last line, though, is borrowed from Jane Austen's Emma, where she is bragging about having successfully played matchmaker for her friends.


End file.
